Coalition Rule in Ethiopia Is Facing Growing Fears of Collapse

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996.
To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems.
Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

Six months after winning control of this war-weary, impoverished nation, the new Ethiopian Government is struggling to keep its people together despite ethnic conflicts, a rock-bottom economy and a dispirited bureaucracy.

There is growing apprehension here in the capital that an experiment to dismantle the traditionally autocratic central government into self-governing regions based on ethnicity will result in the disintegration of the country. This danger is accentuated, Ethiopians and Western donors say, as President Meles Zenawi refuses to shed the Marxist economic ideas of his insurgency movement and pushes the peasants and urban dwellers into even deeper poverty.

"I can see a scenario where it goes down the tubes," a Western diplomat said. "It's not hard to imagine a Yugoslavia. But everyone wants to avoid that."

One member of the new Government said, "I can see civil war ahead." U.S. Backs Coalition

After routing the army of the Marxist Government of Lieut. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam last May, the insurgent group based in Tigre province in the north and led by Mr. Meles formed a coalition government at a national conference in July. In contrast to its hostile relations with Colonel Mengistu, the United States blessed the Meles Government by sending five State Department officials to the conference, including the Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, Herman J. Cohen.

The main partnership in the Government is between Mr. Meles's Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front and the Oromo Liberation Front, based on the Oromo people of the southern region and the country's largest ethnic group. The Oromo of the south are largely Muslim and the Tigreans of the north are Christians of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. And they speak different languages.

There have been increasing incidents of fighting between the armed forces of these two ethnic groups as Mr. Meles's forces move into the south as a national army and clash with a rising tide of Oromo nationalism, according to reports from both sides.

In the last several days, units of both forces have clashed in the string of towns from the city of Harar in the east to Awash, about 200 miles west of Addis Ababa. In the last several months, there has also been fighting in the Oromo regions of Arusi, to the south of the capital, and in Wallaga, to the west. War Hurts Farming

The southern region is agriculturally the most fertile of this chronically food-short country, but the area is now so chaotic that farming has been severely curtailed, agricultural experts said.

In an interview, Mr. Meles, who is 37 years old, acknowledged that while the ethnic clashes were worrisome, "Things have not gone too far, yet."

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

"Once we have new security in place with a new police force and all armed groups inside camps, there should be no reasons for armed conflicts," he said. Mr. Meles said he was confident that the election of regional assemblies, planned for three months from now, would undercut Oromo or other ethnic secessionist sentiments.

But members of his own Government concede that it will be exceedingly difficult to hold regional elections in a poorly educated country that has never known democracy and with the ethnic tensions that prevail in the south. To keep Ethiopia together, Mr. Meles must prevent in other regions what he has agreed to in Eritrea, the northernmost province, which is already functioning as a separate entity. In mid-1993, the Eritreans are planning a United Nations referendum that will most likely confirm and legalize Eritrean independence.

Here in the Ethiopian capital, a valley of ramshackle iron-roofed houses and some dilapidated high-rises, the most obvious difference since the fall of the Colonel Mengistu is Government-sanctioned debate in coffee shops, on television and in the newspapers. After a 17-year era of Stalinesque fear, people are talking and grumbling, often on ethnic grounds. The previously dormant university is abuzz with students. Rise in Banditry

But against this backdrop of new-found expression, there is increased banditry in the city and countryside, mostly by destitute members of the demobilized, 500,000-member Mengistu army.

This insecurity will be aggravated, several Ethiopian and Western economists said, by the Government's disappointing economic plan. Announced last month, the long-awaited plan allowed for the privatizing of trading that left the rest of the already barely functioning economy, including the state farms, in the hands of the bankrupt Government.

This failure to make any serious commitment to economic reform may jeopardize much of the promised two-year package of $500 million from the World Bank, an Ethiopian economist familiar with the plan said.

Mr. Meles's case with the World Bank was not helped, Western diplomats said, since his two chief economic advisers, Kasu Ilala and Wanwossen Kebede, two loyalists from the Tigrean insurgency, appeared to be unreconstructed Marxists. Mr. Kasu's professional background is plant science and not finance, they added.

A version of this article appears in print on January 10, 1992, on Page A00006 of the National edition with the headline: Coalition Rule in Ethiopia Is Facing Growing Fears of Collapse. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe